Konzepttext:
New forms of reciprocity
The area of intervention, the newly designed Bergpark is situated on the former mine area, and linked with the new ‘Kreativ Quartier Lohberg’. It is also situated next to the garden city Lohberg, were most of the inhabitants live who worked on the former mine site. ‘Choreography
of a Landscape’ wants to create a public track alongside these places while at the same time revalue and create a more qualitative living environment. In the past there has been different forms of reciprocity between the former mine site and the garden city Lohberg before, but they lost their obviousness and immediateness with the closure of the mine industry. According to Kreativ Quartier Lohberg’s brochure both tourists and creatives could fill this need. However we think that new forms of reciprocity should be created between the garden city, its inhabitants and their immediate surroundings that can strengthen economical and social relationships again. The Ruhr old mining sites are everywhere undergoing massive transformation and a shift occurs
from an industrial site with related activities, into a leisure and tourist side. This transformation process, which they are under going has put a lot of pressure on neighborhoods and its inhabitants, which you see in public space as well as in the high employment and social stress because of it. The question is how can the existing inhabitants take not only part in this transformation process but benefit form it as well. How do they become the producers of this change? We look at this transformation not as a chain of products but a continuous process and the questions to us is how can we make this an inclusive process. What kind of interventionist strategies do we need to make this process more inhabitable for the people? Enabling the individual or the community to participate in the future of the old mine site Bergpark means more to us than presenting them with a few choices in consultations session as this still views the citizen as a consumer. In our practise we look for ways to reorganize systems of urban development in such a way that it re-engage people again in the production of their immediate environment and its images. In our work we want to make inhabitants collectively responsible for the place they live in, not as consumers but as creators. The underlying question to our work is: How can we create a process of developing people’s immediate environment in which, they in discussion with one another, can address one another as co-producers of their place?
Occupations of transformation
This project wants to put into question the perception of the transformation of the former industrial landscape into ‘leisure green spaces’ and want to look at how they can become again space of neighborhood production. It wants to investigate what kind of new forms of reciprocity between the neighborhood and the landscape it will need. It questions different cultural perspectives of use and productivity of space and ideas around ways to occupy the transformation process of the area and how the production of their daily environment becomes an insensitive for work again. How can the different cultural perceptions of the use of outdoor space be created communally? How can the site become again a landscape providing work and identity to the people inhabiting it?
In the centre of this it will put the question ‘Who cares’, for the public space and what kind of care do they think it needs and who is willing to invest energy in it. How can people living and working in the area become the inhabitants of the transformations process and become active participants in it – producers of public (green) space rather than the consumers of designed space. For this an idea of ownership needs to be developed alongside a true questioning of what kind of space would suit the neighborhood in transformation. In order to actively encourage people to make in their territory an environment in which they can create, produce, disseminate, distribute and have access to their own cultural expressions. To take collective responsibility to find ways to co-produce an alternative together.
Groundwork AG - The user as ‘land agent’
Garden city – mine industry heritage -spoil heap that has become nature, this is the sequence that we find in Dinslaken today, which in itself already forms a collection of great contrasts. And it seems that the abandoned mine landscape that the he industry has left behind, now must be filled by the neighborhood through Leisure activities. We think that for new relationship to form between the landscape and the village of Lohberg it is important to dissolve the Borders between the garden city and the park landscape in order to make a more natural passage between the different entities. The current design of the park is very formal, and the question is how the future detailing of this design and its production can be in formed by existing local qualities and skills. We would like to create new ways of production and engagements and by physical and programmatic interventions initiate forms of social use that will strengthen the landscape and make it more resilient. The project will set up a process of participation with different cultural groups in the area, but mainly young people out of work, about what it would takes to make them ‘rentmeester’ [Land agent; -a person who take cares of a piece of land] of the changing landscape in the transformation process and a format on how to develop strategies for user occupation of these sites in the future. It will make use of elements in the park that are planned for the moment – like the piers, the benches or even playground equipment, and use those as vehicles for this occupational transformation process.
The Idea is to reconnect the neighborhood with the landscape by means of creating a new ‘park ‘service and training center’ for young people. A contemporary work force that will produce the different park elements that still need to be further developed as well as the maintenance of the park and its functions and programs and create collectively a new image of the environment.
Neighborhood Learning & Work
In the year leading up to the implantation of the design we will ask youngsters from the different communities that make up the area to join us a product and park design workshop en training centre for five days a week. We will start with building a temporary moveable classroom from which we will begin to work on the re-appropriation of the design elements of the park. Questions that will underlay the future detail designs and its execution are the sustainable use of the landscape both social as environmentally.
We will start with looking at the proposed the Piers and the way the youngsters imagine them and their function. Second by looking into how they piers can form a transition from the town of Lohberg to they pond. Later the workshops will also take charge of the building and delivering of the Piers as well as the more maintenance park area and its programmatic use. We will also look at ways in which we can introduce a social network in the area of the Bergpark by making interventions that can act as social bridges and stimulate interactions with the landscape.
The workshop Groundwork AG will do this by organizing a series of classed and happenings, for example instruction workshop or sessions on how to design by using the expertise of the artists and creative enterprises that are in the KQL and other skill based expert out the region. We will also work closely together wit existing unemployment programs. The aim is to challenge young people to become ‘Rentmeester’ [land agent] of the space and come up with forms of occupation, a user scheme of and hopefully more imaginative forms of use.
Beurteilung des Fachbeirats:
Jeanne van Heeswijk
Groundwork – New Forms of Reciprocity
Die Arbeit ‘Groundwork – New Forms of Reciprocity’ von Jeanne van Heeswijk & Marcel van der Meijs ist laut Einschätzung des Fachbeirates als ‚prozesshafte Anleitung zum eigenständigen Denken‘ zu verstehen. Das ‚fliegende Klassenzimmer‘ bildet als wandernde skulpturale Setzung eine Brücke zwischen Gartenstadt und Bergpark Lohberg und steht zugleich als Metapher für eine kollaborative Arbeitsweise. Insbesondere goutiert der Fachbeirat, dass im Unterschied zu klassischen Beteiligungsformaten der Stadtplanung, Heeswijks Arbeit eine neue Handlungsebene einbezieht, die in einem einjährigen Prozess, eine Rückaneignung des bereits geplanten Parks durch die Anwohner ermöglicht und so implizit die Botschaft in sich trägt, dass Politik jeden offen steht.
Zur Realisierung empfohlen
